Espoo bees, not nice

This evening Peter removed the honey frames from the hives in Espoo, in order to being them to Pojo for spinning. Unfortunately the bees did not think this was a good idea.  They went berserk, crazy and started attacking Peter, Fred, the neighbours, the house, the car.... everything in range.  P said he had never witnessed such aggressive behaviour from a hive. It took several hours before the colony calmed down and he was able to remove his suit and start the drive to Pojo. He even had to hose himself down with water to try and get them away.  The big mistake was to think he could visit the hive without smoke (lazy) and the other mistake was not telling the neighbours to take cover (but he did warn them that he was about to open the hive).

Needless to say, the aggressive hive contained a huge queen and a large amount of  honey! 

During the night Tom and his friends helped to decap the frames and Peter spun the honey. When I was decapping I told Peter that the honey from Espoo had a completely different aroma to the Pojo hives.  Then, later on, when Thomas took over he said exactly the same thing!   For me, the Espoo honey smells more "flowery" - like a perfume, but it is very difficult to describe.

Anyway, we have resigned ourselves to the fact that having hives in Espoo is not a good idea: the logistics are too complicated and it causes too many problems (mowing the lawn, swarms etc) so this year's Espoo batch will be unique! We will bring the hives back to Pojo before the winter and leave them on the foundations of the old barn in Rosendal.  We will also do something about that queen - maybe buy ourselves a nice, gentle italian queen and oust the old lady who is breeding all these aggressive monsters.

About another 50 frames from Espoo to add to our yield, we are somewhere around 380 kg of honey now.